Natural Law and the 'Right' to Health Care

Is there a "right" to health care? The UN, the EU, and now the US Congress are on record as taking the affirmative on this question. The basic rationale is that the fact of everyone's needing health care (true) translates directly into everyone's having a right to it (false). Such thinking is emblematic of the perpetually puerile, primary-process predisposition of the modern liberal mind: "I need, therefore you give."

Or, as another famous "progressive" once put it: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

What this admittedly abbreviated version of the "health-care-is-a-right" position misses is the critical distinction between negative rights and positive ones, and the further distinction between genuine and counterfeit rights.

In sum, one can either believe in the "right" to health care, or the Constitution's foundation in natural law. It is impossible to believe in both.

The rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, are generally identified as "negative rights."

There cannot exit a rights which obligates the services of another. It's that simple. On has a right to an attorney but that simply means one does not have to argue one's case oneself. If legal representation were an actual right, Legal Aid wouldn't have to raise money to pay for it.

The comparable "right" in the realm of medicine would be a right that one doesn't have to do one's own surgery or diagnosis.

This article brushes upon the most critical philosophical struggle of our times: Natural Law v Positive Law.

Natural Law as described in the article:

“The rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” enumerated in the Declaration of Independence are generally identified as “negative rights.” They protect us from others (including the government) without obliging us to do anything for others, except of course to recognize that others possess the same rights as we. Negative rights are both limited and reciprocal. They are also eternal and unchanging, being part of the very fabric of nature itself. Like matter, they can be neither created nor destroyed.

The U.S. Constitution clearly reflects the same natural law approach to rights so eloquently expounded in the Declaration.

Despite many other disagreements, the great social and political philosophers who so influenced the Founders never argued that such-and-such “should” be a right; rather, they claimed that such-and-such was, always had been, and always would be a right. The question was never about creating rights, which would have struck them as absurd, but how to perceive clearly the eternal, unchangeable rights that did exist and always had existed.”

Socialist/marxist/commie states do not recognize Natural Law they recognize only Positive Law which is to say whatever the legislature/king/czar/warlord/community organizer says it is.

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